What’s your strategic abandonment list? #SAVMP

Strategic abandonment is essential to educator sanity. We consistently describe the importance of taking things off our plates…especially removing things off the plates of our educators…but are we truly intentional about doing it!?!

I sat in a meeting with my administrative teammates this past week and one of them (@jeremyvarnell) challenged us to decide what we would remove off our teachers’ plates in advance before we consider adding something else that would require more time. It’s easy to pile on more and more responsibility without considering the negative effects on our educators. It’s even easier to add things that come from the top-down, such as district or state level expectations. But, as school leaders, our staff depends on us to filter the important aspects and stabilize their responsibility by removing tasks/responsibility that have low importance. Administrators should calibrate with this question before adding additional expectations:

What can be removed in advance to maintain a healthy work-life balance for educators?

Once decided, it may be important to publicize what’s being removed so that educators can see tangible results of those efforts. The power of “why” remains essential in the administrator-educator partnership. We have to be visible, active supporters of our team of educators!